How are you coping with feelings of deficiency or emptiness?
If the question is asked and answered honestly, just about every human being will admit to feeling some degree of personal deficiency or lack— the notion that they are somehow not all that they can be. They feel empty, worthless or valueless in some way. As a result, it’s a universal human experience to suffer feelings of confusion, frustration, fear, resentment, guilt or even shame.
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to refer to this feeling of being ‘less than you could be’, or ‘not being good enough’ as a hole in your life. Experiencing the hole is like feeling a cloud coming over your sun: you feel you lack worth; you feel empty inside.
To avoid this feeling, many people act as phonies and frauds; others take the aggressive road, becoming bullies; and still others stay fearful and submissive, deferential to all authority. It doesn’t have to be that way. The hole is a natural state that can promote conscious and healthy growth, if dealt with openly and honestly.
The hole of deficiency can be filled
The question is not whether to fill the hole, but how you choose to do it. How far you will experience inner peace and happiness in your life is a function of how you choose to fill your own hole.
There are two principal ways people tend to go about ‘hole filling’—from without or from within. The former results in digging a deeper hole; the latter results in the hole reducing itself—even eliminating itself altogether.
Filling from without
When people look outside themselves for a quick-fix that will bring a short-term feeling of ‘OK-ness’, they either inflate who they are to deal with the emptiness, or try to fill the hole with stuff, stuff and more stuff. Many of them spend their whole life seeking approval and security through obsessive activities designed to cause other people to supply the sense of ‘OK-ness’ they lack. The narcissist is but one example of an individual who tries to fill their hole from the outside with admiration and recognition.
People like this always need to stand out and be seen to be ‘somebody’. Filling their hole of deficiency drives them to try to be the center of the Universe through a life characterized by vanity, arrogance and egotism. The result, however, is to dig themselves into an ever deepening hole that requires more and more filling.
Those who try filling the hole from without soon find that the hole never is filled. They try ever more frantically to fill their hole, but whatever they try seems to have less and less impact, like needing more of a drug to gain the same ‘high’. Hole-filling for them is a never-ending battle, exhausting on every level, as their hole sinks deeper and their need for approval grows stronger.
Filling from within
Filling the hole from within requires a conscious and honest exploration of your sense of deficiency, while accepting that some such feelings of lack are natural. By exploring from inside, you can acquire an understanding of why we carry such ‘holes’ around with us, and what supports their gradual removal. If you work steadily from this place of acceptance, the hole begins to fill itself.
The tools and practices used to fill the hole from within include journaling, self-reflection, meditation, silence, and deep inner questioning. The more your hole is explored, then reduced in size, the more your inner strength and courage arise to allow you to be yourself, without your ego needing any phony packaging or shoring up. You won’t need to put on the cloak of a false self and pretend to be somebody other than who you are.
What we resist, persists. When we resist the hole and look to fill it from the outside, the hole will persist and grow deeper. When we allow the feelings connected to the hole and work with these feelings, the hole will begin to fill itself. You can choose to reduce and then eliminate the hole, or dig a deeper one. It’s up to you.
Here are some questions to start the process of ‘hole-filling’:
- In what ways do you feel deficient or empty? Why do you feel that way? How do you feel about feeling the way you do?
- Do you try to fill your hole from outside by activities designed to make you feel secure and have some sense of ‘OK-ness’? What does all this activity get you?
- Do you ever feel like a phony? Do you ever consciously choose to be a fake? If so, why?
- Do you often feel the need to be the life of the party, the ‘know-it-all’, the expert?
- Do you play small and try to be invisible much of the time? Do you often feel what you are and do is not enough in some way? Do you know why?
- What one or two baby steps can you take in the next week or two to explore your feelings around lack or deficiency and start allowing your hole to fill itself?
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